I have tested the free ways to expose my blog ever since I started blogging. I have gained a significant amount of attention from a lot of bloggers and I think I have reached the limit of how far I can go with free exposure. Of course if a person is an expert in SEO then he can easily gain traffic, but it takes time, and I believe I waited long enough.

Exposure and more Exposure
John Chow actually paid for his marketing with AdWords and that’s one of the main reasons his blog became very popular within 6 months. I’m not much of an AdWords fan, because to master AdWords you need to risk losing money by testing, or invest hundreds of dollars in experts who know how to use AdWords well. As a small time blogger and a college student with a small budget, I do my best to get the best deal for the least amount of money; therefore, I watch out for how much I spend on my blog.

Does it really take money to make money?
In my opinion it does. I have been looking at different blogs like ShoeMoney.com, ProBlogger.net and other sites. Those sites’ traffic increased when they invested money into their blogs to get exposed. They actually paid a few times to have their blogs exposed and from that point, they got enough exposure to gain good enough traffic. That traffic obviously led to more traffic as more and more bloggers linked to them. That traffic generated a lot of money paying for their marketing. Now they don’t have to do any more marketing because their site has gained a great amount of exposure.

Another example would be Matt Coddington’s NetBusinessBlog.com. He paid for two reviews, according to DailyBlogTips.com, leading to a good amount of exposure. If I recall, in the last post I read on his blog he mentioned that he made up to $1500/month from his site, and that doesn’t have AdSense earnings. That’s smart right there, he writes well and he paid a good amount of money to quickly gain enough exposure to be where he is now. Not only that, he’s not dependent on AdSense to generate revenue from his blog.

Should you pay to get exposed?
If you’re serious about blogging then I believe you should pay to have your blog exposed. I paid for one review and I got a significant amount of traffic. I paid Kumiko from CashQuests.com to do a review for this site and I’m glad that I did. She did an excellent job reviewing my site on a detailed level. I already had links from Kumiko’s site beforehand through the comments I left; however, it still wasn’t enough to get exposed. I didn’t want just links from her site, I wanted traffic. Her visitors will give the majority of their attention to the blog posts, so by submitting a review request, I wanted to see how much exposure I can get if Kumiko wrote a post about my site; the results were amazing. Recently, I’m getting a lot of emails from people asking for advice and they tell me they found my site through Kumiko’s site; thank you Kumiko.

Kumiko’s site currently has a PageRank 0, but it still gets traffic from her old site, which has a PageRank 5 and a Technorati rank of 3,257. So, therefore, paying for the review was a good investment.

At the moment I’m saving up for another good paid review for my site. The review for the site I’m targeting is very expensive, but I know that it’s worth it, and the exposure will pay for the review itself. I’m not going to say which blogger I’ll pay to review my site at the moment, but if you go around the blogsphere then you will find the review once that person has posted it. I’ll be tweaking this site in the next few weeks to prepare for the surge so just wait and see.

Would you pay for your site to get exposed? Do you think my investing plan is smart?

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